Ray Pride

"With great power... comes great responsibility."

--Peter Parker, in "Spider-Man"

To the bottom line, that is.

As failed producer and studio executive Peter Guber is notorious for chanting, "It's show business, not show-show." During most months of the moviegoing year, the average harried moviegoer who'd like to be able to randomly drop into a show at the multiplex gets the business-business. We're all at the whims of the rigid codes of the studio bureaucracy, which design product and publicity with heartless vigor. "XXX" and "Die Another Day" may be diverting eye candy, but no one can say that everyone involved is being allowed to work at the height of their cleverness. What's the smart moviegoer--or the smart filmmaker--to do?

Wait for Christmas, it seems, when Hollywood's finally unembarrassed about actually having people with taste in its midst.

Franchise movies take advantage of the greater number of potential viewers, with entries like the latest "Harry Potter," "Lord of the Rings," and "Star Trek" series. But it's also a time when the otherwise mercantile makes as many apologies as Trent Lott, bowing in the direction of talent. During the holiday season leading up into winter's relentless crush of awards programs, climaxing with the Academy Awards in March, the film industry goes for a makeover, and puts on its smart cap, its social awareness topcoat, and its shiny art shoes. You'd think from looking over the list of movies being released between now and New Year's Eve in New York and Los Angeles that not only was this a champion year for business in American movies, with a new box-office record set in November, but a champion year for intelligence, taste and daring. This weekend alone sees wide releases of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation and Martin Scorsese and Harvey Weinstein's Gangs of New York. Love or loathe them, these two movies have enough ambition to light a city. (Whereas most weekends of the year, I think of the late critic James Agee's formulation that some forgotten shred of dreck should have a bell tied around its neck and be driven out of town to shouts of "unclean, unclean.")

So it's the spiffy season. Pick up Entertainment Weekly or the New York Times or any other national publication, and there's a wealth of quality to choose from. But can you see them yet?

Nope. I try to look at the bright side: instead of a traffic jam of all the good stuff, Chicago gets six weeks of Christmas, with movies trickling in each weekend. Area moviegoers, like everyone in other cities outside of New York and Los Angeles, get to read year-end critics' Top Ten lists that include movies that won't make it here until as late as February--neatly, right about the week that Academy Award nominations come out.

The Academy defines a 2002 release as any movie that's played for a minimum seven-day run in a commercial theater in Los Angeles that commences before December 31. Some critics' circles and critics define releases otherwise, which can lead to hilarious contortions. Do you include a film that you've been shown, as a critic, which opened in NY and LA before the end of 2002 in a best-of-the-year inventory or do you save it until a 2003 list when it's already gotten its honors? It's a lot simpler just to consider the six weeks of Christmas leading into a thirteen-month entertainment year.

It's no less a contortion than those created by the studios in their own internal rationalizations. Still, the overall shape of Christmas 2002's movie releases comes from several kinds of delays. While Catch Me If You Can was a movie that Steven Spielberg impulsively decided to make quickly, "Gangs of New York" (See review, p. 19) has been brewing for eons. Miramax previewed a version of the violent film, with its mass-killings climax in Lower Manhattan, on September 10, 2001. A number of postponements followed. Spielberg shot his film and his company, DreamWorks, battled Miramax over the Christmas Day release date. Miramax blinked. The dueling Leos leads to critical essays inevitably comparing the pictures, the larky "Catch Me If You Can" grouped with Scorsese's grandiloquently overproduced cockroach opera, like juicy oranges to rotten apples. May the best marketing man win.

Miramax also held up several movies after 9/11 that could have been considered distasteful or questioning of American foreign policy, including The Quiet American, Australian-born Philip Noyce's adaptation of the Graham Greene novel, with Michael Caine as an American correspondent in Vietnam in the late 1950s. Sir Michael's grumbling about the movie's shelving led to a kind of test run at the Toronto Film Festival in September, and rave reviews for the film, and especially, Caine, have led to the film's release being scheduled for next year. With advertisements larded with critical hosannas, of course. The anomaly is that Noyce then went on and made Rabbit-Proof Fence, a more modestly budgeted picture with the same cinematographer, the great, moody Christpher Doyle, best known for his work with Hong Kong's Wong Kar-wai. "Fence" is released on Christmas Day, making Noyce seem as prolific as he is talented in his retreat from Hollywood megabudgeters like "The Bone Collector" and "The Saint." (Another Miramax holdover, the Al Pacino-starring People will Talk, critical of an unnamed mayor who is plainly Rudy Giuliani, is slotted for Sundance in January.) Disney will be releasing Spike Lee's latest, The 25th Hour, one of the first movies to take place in a recognizably post-9/11 Manhattan, including scenes in which characters are looking down from a skyscraper onto Ground Zero. Focus Features is withholding The Guys, based on the New York theater success, until February, with Sigourney Weaver as an academic who's asked by fire captain Anthony LaPaglia to help compose the many eulogies he has been called upon to write for fallen firemen.

"Adaptation" is a possible masterpiece, another movie that was delayed several times after a prolonged post-production period and yet its advertising art tells you nothing about the movie's comic and dramatic brilliance. But why should it? This is a movie made to be released at the awards season; its hothouse brilliance needs to be nurtured by the hot air of critical adulation. Not that it's unworthy. Moment to moment it may be the most thrilling thing I've seen all year.

In terms of emotional engagement, however, The Pianist, Roman Polanski's brilliant, wrenching return to form, is a demonstration of a true master at work. Nothing seems familiar; disorientation described with exacting formal precision is one part of what makes this description of one Jewish man's experiences in the Warsaw ghetto under the Nazis so brilliant. Adrien Brody's turn in what is by definition a passive role--a man who must hide, a pianist who must remain silent, an artist who must carry bricks, a sensitive man who must take insult--carries not the weight of the world, but of a soul. Anyone who shivers at the idea of another depiction of the Holocaust should reconsider: a great artist at the height of his powers offers an act of witness, transferring his experiences as a child in the Krakow Ghetto to those of pianist Wladyslaw Szpilman.

If heartbreaking renditions of the human condition don't strike a festive chord, you could wait for Paramount and Miramax's The Hours, Stephen Daldry's film of playwright David Hare's adaptation of Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer-Prize winning novel, in which you get three potential suicides for the price of one. But there's a Philip Glass score, so it can't be a downer, can it? A more operatic dramatic effort is Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven, which will expand to more theaters as increasing numbers of nods come its way; the New York Film Critics Circle awarded it a torrid five of eight possible citations. Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her is even more tear-stained, a male weepie about the love of women that retains his irreverence while burnishing his knack for baroque décor and plot turns.

The most euphoric of the season's releases may be the musical Chicago, with Catherine Zeta-Jones smashing as a 1920s hoofer-turned-killer pitted for publicity against fresh-faced murderer Roxie Hart (Renee Zellweger, charming but unglamorously lit). The camera swirls and the camera swirls and I could only think: I miss Bob Fosse.

Of course, it's not just the major studios and their art-house subsidiaries who can gain from a little Christmas cheer. New York's tiny but cultivated Cowboy Pictures is brave enough to take on Lynne Ramsay's haunting, imperfect, and completely brilliant tone poem, Morvern Callar. Samantha Morton's performance as a lost girl in the modern world is, to some, sleepwalking, to others, a champagne toast to the possibilities of screen acting.

And speaking of possibilities, remember: If you want a very cinematic Christmas twelve months a year, you have great power, too. In nine-dollar increments.

(2002-12-18)

Also by Ray Pride

Tip of the Week
What's Irish painter and decorator Desmond Doyle (Pierce Brosnan) to do when his wife scoots out on him the day after Christmas with an Englishman, leaving him with two young boys and a small girl?
(2002-12-12)

The J-Lo Show
While Wayne Wang doesn't do for Lopez what Steven Soderbergh did in "Out of Sight," the often-indie Hong Kong-born veteran still brings an unlikely combination of romance and working-class verisimilitude to what could have been just another "Pretty Woman" wannabe.
(2002-12-12)

Tip of the Week
The first anniversary of the ambitious monthly showcase of music, film shorts, and videos takes over the Biograph for the weekend.
(2002-12-04)

DVD Tip of the Week
hile it's nice to see behind-the-scenes footage of the shooting of Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 "Contempt" ("Le mepris") and a new interview with cinematographer Raoul Coutard among other features in a two-DVD edition, the great gift is the film itself.
(2002-12-04)

Time regained
(2002-12-04)

My Big Fat Night
(2002-12-04)

Turn into the slide
(2002-11-26)

Perfectly mediocre
(2002-11-20)

Tip of the Week
(2002-11-13)

Imitation of Life
(2002-11-13)

Tip of the Week
(2002-11-06)

Purty mouth
(2002-11-06)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment